![]() In other words, the Chinese-inspired name of the kanji and how it is pronounced in a Japanese sentence are often completely different. For example, we call "C" "see," but often pronounce it like a "K," and we call "W" "double-you" but pronounce it completely differently, by pursing our lips and forcing a little air out. This sort of equates to what we call the letters of the English alphabet as opposed to how we actually pronounce them. ![]() This native Japanese reading is called the kun-yomi. However, in a sentence it is often read a completely different way, using, of course, a Japanese word that existed from before kanji entered the picture. Japanese kanji retain the original Chinese pronunciation (or "reading"), which is called on yomi and identifies the kanji itself. ![]() In China, each kanji has only one pronunciation, but in Japan things got more complicated as a result of having to superimpose this imported system on the very different Japanese language. and ends with the incredibly complex 23-stroke kanga 鑑 (meaning "to heed" or "be mindful of"). A kanji dictionary begins with the kanji for "one": a single horizonal stroke: 一. A single stroke is usually just a line or a dot. Kanji are listed in the dictionary by stroke number, i.e., how many lines or dots it takes to write it. Or the radical for "grass" - typically at the top, such as in "flower" 花 - denotes lesser vegetation, while the radical for "tree" 木- typically at the left - a tree, or at least something usually made of wood. For example, the radical "gold" 金 - typically at the left of a character - signifies that the meaning of character is associated with something metallic. The general meaning of a kanji can generally be understood by recognizing just its main radical. Many kanji comprise a single radical, however most are a combination, with each radical taking one of fourteen possible positions, such as top, bottom, left, right, corner, enclosing, etc. The building blocks of each individual kanji are ideographic elements known as radicals, or in Japanese bushu (部首), of which there are 214. The art of writing those characters, i.e., calligraphy or shodo in Japanese, became essential for learning, and is still a required subject in Japanese elementary schools.īut Japanese is a completely different language from Chinese, so two supplementary phonetic "alphabets," hiragana and katakana, were developed from kanji to ease along what was essentially a difficult marriage between the Chinese writing system and the Japanese language. The main use of kanji in Japan at that time was for official diplomatic documents and Buddhist texts. Japanese was purely a spoken language before the introduction of kanji from China, via Korea, in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D. Japanese supplements kanji with the phonetic scripts of hiragana and katakana, but kanji is the basis of written Japanese. Kanji are symbolic Chinese characters used to write the Japanese language.
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